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Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 10, pages 405–415 (2009)Cite this article

Key Points

  • There are currently ∼7,000 different living human languages. The peak of language diversity may have been ∼10,000 years ago when up to 20,000 different languages might have been spoken.

  • Languages evolve by a process of descent with modification that is remarkably similar to the evolution of biological species, and languages and species have many analogies, such as genes and words, lateral gene transfer and borrowing.

  • It is possible to construct family trees or phylogenies of languages that retrace the history of descent with modification of language families, such as the Indo-European languages. These trees are surprisingly tree-like, which shows that, despite the possibility of acquiring words from other languages, the majority of language elements are stably and vertically transmitted.

  • Languages show remarkable fidelity in their transmission, sometimes rivalling that of genes, despite being a culturally transmitted replicator that is subject to myriad population and social influences.

  • Words vary at least 100-fold in the rate at which new unrelated forms come to replace older words: there are 15 different ways to say 'bird' in Indo-European languages, but all of the ways of saying 'two' are related.

  • Words that are used at the highest frequencies in everyday speech are among the most conserved across languages, and some words have related forms that may go back over 10,000 years.

  • Language may act socially to reinforce group membership and identity. When a language initially divides into two distinct speech communities there may be a period of rapid change that serves to distinguish the two nascent languages.

  • Of the six possible ways that languages can order the subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) in a sentence, the SVO and SOV orders predominate in the world's languages. Word order has probably co-evolved over thousands of years with the way that a language modifies sentence objects.

Abstract

Human languages form a distinct and largely independent class of cultural replicators with behaviour and fidelity that can rival that of genes. Parallels between biological and linguistic evolution mean that statistical methods inspired by phylogenetics and comparative biology are being increasingly applied to study language. Phylogenetic trees constructed from linguistic elements chart the history of human cultures, and comparative studies reveal surprising and general features of how languages evolve, including patterns in the rates of evolution of language elements and social factors that influence temporal trends of language evolution. For many comparative questions of anthropology and human behavioural ecology, historical processes estimated from linguistic phylogenies may be more relevant than those estimated from genes.

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Figure 1: Tree of Indo-European languages.
Figure 2: Rates of lexical replacement.
Figure 3: Rates of lexical replacement are stable among language families.
Figure 4: Relationships between language and species distribution.
Figure 5: Evolution of word order changes.

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Acknowledgements

I thank C. Venditti, A. Calude, I. Peiros, A. Meade, Q. Atkinson, M. Ruhlen, M. Cysouw and M. Haspelmath for help, comments and suggestions. Grants to M.P. from the Leverhulme Trust and the Natural Environment Research Council supported this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AH, Berkshire, UK

    Mark Pagel

  2. Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

    Mark Pagel

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FURTHER INFORMATION

Mark Pagel's homepage

Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database

SplitsTree

Swadesh list

World Atlas of Linguistic Structures

Glossary

Languages

Linguists identify two languages as distinct when, according to various criteria, they become mutually unintelligible.

Phylogeny

A branching diagram describing the set of ancestral–descendant relationships among a group of species or languages.

Borrowing

The acquisition of a new non-cognate word from another language.

Phoneme

Characteristically thought of as the smallest units of speech-sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language. Phonemes are not universal, but act as the fundamental building blocks to produce all of the words of a given language.

Cognate

Two words are deemed cognate if they derive by a process of descent with modification from a common ancestral word.

Sum over histories

A mathematical technique that accounts for all possible ancestral states (that is, all possible histories) when finding the likelihood of observing the gene sequence or other data among extant species.

Parsimony

When applied to phylogenetic inference in a linguistic context, parsimony is a method that seeks the phylogenetic tree that implies the fewest number of changes among cognate classes.

Distance

As applied to phylogenetic inference in a linguistic context, distance is a set of methods that infer an underlying phylogenetic tree from a matrix of the pair-wise differences among all languages.

Likelihood

A statistical quantity defined as an amount that is proportional to the probability of observing some set of data given a particular model of how those data arose. In linguistic phylogenetic applications one finds the likelihood of the lexical data on the proposed tree given some model of how words evolve.

Maximum likelihood method

A statistical technique for finding the parameters of a model that make the observed data most likely or probable under that model.

Markov chain Monte Carlo

(MCMC). A statistical method for searching a complex high-dimensional space. As applied to phylogenetic inference in a linguistic context, MCMC methods return a sample of trees that are statistically representative of the trees that might arise from a given model of how words evolve.

Indo-European languages

A family of related languages that derive from a common ancestral language that probably arose in Anatolia around 8,000 years ago and then spread throughout Europe, India, and what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

Monophyletic

In a phylogenetic context, a group of species (or languages) is monophyletic if they derive from a common ancestor not shared with any other species (or languages). The Germanic languages are monophyletic and are distinct from the monophyletic group of Romance languages. Monophyly implies that the group has just one origin.

Bantu languages

A group of approximately 500 languages that is part of the larger Niger-Congo language family. Bantu languages probably arose 3,000 years ago in West Africa, possibly close to present day Cameroon, and then spread east and then south eventually reaching to present day South Africa.

Clade

In the context of languages, a clade is a group of related languages.

Lexical replacement

The rate of lexical replacement is the rate at which a word is replaced by a new non-cognate word.

Language year

In a phylogenetic context, each of the branches of a phylogeny represents some amount of evolution that occurs independently of the evolution in other branches. If the times in years that these branches represent are added together, the result records the total number of years of evolution that the tree represents; that is, the total number of language years.

Gamma correction

An elegant mathematical technique developed for characterizing the evolution of gene sequences that allows the nucleotides at different sites in the gene to evolve or be replaced at varying rates. The same technique can be applied to characterize the differing rates of evolution among lexical items.

Linguistic universals

A set of features of language and relationships among those features that the great comparative linguist Joseph Greenberg proposed would be found in all or nearly all languages, or which would at least show statistical evidence for being linked.

Word order

The typical order of subjects, verbs and objects in a sentence.

Pre versus postpositioning

Whether a language places the phrase that modifies a sentence object before (preposition) or after (postposition) that object in the sentence.

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Pagel, M. Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator. Nat Rev Genet 10, 405–415 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2560

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